Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Chris -- 2025-05-10
Watercrest for watercress – first saw it on a menu in Bodega Bay, CA over Thanksgiving weekend. Returned home and googled it – searching watercrest alone brought up many housing development names, but searching “watercrest recipes” gave 636,000 hits. There were so many hits that it prompted me to search the OED (full text) for watercrest to make sure I wasn’t missing something. Nothing came up in the OED or here (the OED hyphenates it).
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What is crest-like about it?
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I don’t know if most people realize that watercress grows in/along bodies of water (it is considered an aquatic or semi-aquatic plant). If they do perhaps they know “crest” has something to do with water (crest of a wave; rivers cresting), while “cress” is unknown to them. Do you think there is another process at work here?
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Maybe they think it means it grows at the water surface. Or they’ve added a superstitious t. There are only about 10 hits that I could find, some of which have been corrected and don’t actually appear on the page. Otherwise I like it. There are a few dubious hits for watercaress, mixed in with lots of acombinations.
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